Maxine crouches beside me. ‘You can’t touch her.’

As I release my grip, I notice the nails. They are well cared for, and though they protrude no more than a few millimetres beyond the tips of her fingers, they are painted pinky-nude. They are not broken – there is no obvious evidence that she fought or struggled.

I want Peggy. I want her to fold me in her arms and let me press myself into her plump softness the way I did as a child.

Tess comes back into the room.

‘Can I ask when this happened?’ I say.

‘The early hours of this morning.’

What I can see of her skin is like a waxwork, but there is a blue tint to the jaundiced-looking yellow.

‘Are those pressure marks on the face?’ Maxine asks. ‘Though they’re not very pronounced.’

The question prompts me to look. It is an accident, a reflex, my movements so quick and panicked that everything is blurred. Before I can tear my eyes away, I glimpse skilfully dyed blonde hair. And I see her face. Her nose and mouth, I think, had oozed blood. The skin around them is extra pale, and her tongue sticks out as if she had bitten it. Her cheeks are dotted with red pinpricks that I think must be some kind of bruising.

‘Could be from post-mortem postural changes,’ Tess says.

What is not pronounced to Tess and Maxine is very pronounced to me.

I have learned too much from Zac. I cannot stop what comes out. ‘It’s suffocation of some kind, isn’t it?’ My voice is quiet. I force my eyes upwards, stop them at her neck, quickly close them before turning my head towards her feet. ‘I can’t see any marks on her neck, so maybe smothering more than strangulation.’

‘And you know this how?’ Tess says.

‘I used to date a cardiologist.’ There is a twinge of fear at saying this, as if Zac were in the room, listening. Even now, I imagine how he would bristle at the word date, and especially at the words used to.

Dating is a word from women’s magazines filled with things that rot your brain. It’s the worst kind of cultural vulgarity.

We will never be in the past tense, Holly. You and I are forever. You don’t go through what we have, invest what we have, only to give up.

This is why I say date. This is why I say used to.

‘Explain what you see, please,’ Tess says.

So I try, in a strange blend of Maxine’s lack of inflection with Zac’s words. What I remember about his saying them to me was his charm, the way he smiled, as if he was telling a dark joke. And that I smiled back, and my face grew flushed, and there were shivers all the way down my arm as he traced a finger over my bare shoulder.